The World's Poorest Continent May Not Have Food, But It Is About To Have A Monorail

It is a well-known fact that the primary driver of China's hollow if scorching (and now slowing) growth over the past decade was an unprecedented surge in fixed investment - a surge so strong it has led to the proliferation of ghost cities across the mainland, and even the Beijing politburo is getting concerned that the epic overcapacity, which incidentally does not pay any cashflows even though it is funded by debt, will lead to an even more epic non-performing loan bust, hence the attempts to slow down Chinese "growth."

However, so far China has been unable to boost either consumption or its middle class to offset the capex expansion momentum, with the bulk of accumulated wealth going to the oligarchy at the very top of social strata (which has been doing its patriotic duty of buying up real estate... in London and New York) while the poor get even poorer.

So what is China to do? Why continue spending tens of billions on fixed investment.... In Africa.

We have shown previously that when it comes to "frontier markets" nobody has been as successful at exploiting Africa, as China. It was in August 2012 when we first showed how China quietly took over Africa.

Since then, Chinese penetration in Africa has merely accelerated and appears to have culminated with the news that China will extend over $12 billion in "aid" to Africa.

Not only that, but very soon the world's most impoverished continent may not have food, but it will have... a monorail.

Reuters reports that Chinese Premier Li Keqiang unveiled extra aid for Africa totalling at least $12 billion on Monday, and offered to share advance technology with the continent to help with development of high-speed rail, state news agency Xinhua reported. Li pledged the additional funding in a speech at the Organisation of African Union headquarters in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, which also doubles as one of the world's poorest countries.

So as the US increases its inventory of drones in such strategic places as Congo and the Central African republic, China will instead go the peaceful route and its increase credit lines to Africa by $10 billion and will boost the China-Africa Development Fund by $2 billion, bringing it to a total of $5 billion, Xinhua said. It provided no details of the timeframe.

And the piece de resistance: Li "depicted a dream that all African capitals are connected with high-speed rail, so as to boost pan-African communication and development," the report said. As China has advanced technologies in this area, Li said China was ready to work with Africa "to make this dream come true".

Because all the up and coming generation of debt slaves to the world's most capitalist country now needs is not food, but fast train connections.

It is Li's first visit to Africa since he became premier last year, and follows on from a trip to the continent by President Xi Jinping in March 2013, when he renewed an offer of $20 billion in loans to Africa between 2013 and 2015.

It was unclear if the aid announced by Li is already included in that figure or if this is new funding.

Chinese officials said last week that Li's trip, which also takes in oil-rich Nigeria and Angola, would not simply be for energy deals and Beijing will be seeking to help boost African living standards.

Some see right through this attempt by China to kill two birds with one stone - to find a new place where to allocate "fixed investment", and in the process, to soak up as much natural resources as possible before the restless natives pull a South African gold mine and go on strike:

Trips by Chinese leaders to Africa are often marked by big natural resource deals, triggering criticism from some quarters that China is only interested in the continent's mineral and energy wealth. Africans broadly see China as a healthy counterbalance to Western influence but, as ties mature, there are growing calls from policymakers and economists for more balanced trade relations.

Too late. The Second Berlin Conference took place years ago and Africa has already been divided: sadly for the US, it is China that is now in control of this resource-rich continent, which may not have enough food for everyone but at least it is about to have a monorail.

You cannot remove responsibility of how bad off Africa is from Africans though.

If it was the West's influence entirely, where was the last incident of 300 girls being kidnapped from a school to be sold and married off? If the west is responsible for this surely it comes out of our culture?

New World was settled and colonized from the 1500s through the early 1800s, when the process of white-ification was essentially completed.

Africa was still an unexplored, unknown continent to Europeans as late as the 1860s. Major battles of colonization were still happening in the late 1800s, the kind of battles that the Spaniards already fought in Mexico/Peru 300 years previously. Europeans were in black Africa as conquerors for much shorter, much later, and with a much lighter touch than in the western hemisphere.

Again, which "West" are people talking about? Did anybody from the western hemisphere get involved in Africa very much before 1900? Why are people so timid when it comes to pointing a finger at Europe?

Between the 1870s and 1900, Africa faced European imperialist aggression, diplomatic pressures, military invasions, and eventual conquest and colonization. At the same time, African societies put up various forms of resistance against the attempt to colonize their countries and impose foreign domination. By the early twentieth century, however, much of Africa, except Ethiopia and Liberia, had been colonized by European powers.

The European imperialist push into Africa was motivated by three main factors, economic, political, and social. It developed in the nineteenth century following the collapse of the profitability of the slave trade, its abolition and suppression, as well as the expansion of the European capitalist Industrial Revolution. The imperatives of capitalist industrialization—including the demand for assured sources of raw materials, the search for guaranteed markets and profitable investment outlets—spurred the European scramble and the partition and eventual conquest of Africa. Thus the primary motivation for European intrusion was economic.

When the Colonialists ran out of gas, it was the setting of those artificial borders, regardless of history and tribal tradition, that has done so much damage. Why the dumb asses don't sit down and re-set things in a rational way would help stop a lot of killing.

Then, if the world would stop swooning every time the Africans dragged out big eyed children with rice belly to extort aid, some progress might get made. Africa has treated the infrastructure left to them just like Coleman Young did in Detroit.

Your ignorance in imagining, per your post, that "Western Imperialism" is responsible for the shithole in being that is Africa, when the actual problem is IQ 75, average, and a primitive tribal mentality, and huge overpopulation; is not exactly breathtaking, but it does show that you've succumbed passively to the liberal propaganda barage about "negro equality".

I would peg it the A.I.D.S. mobile but yours has a nice ring to it as well.

Either way, I have a co worker who came back from angola to report chinese everywhere. Say what one will but their numerous projects seem alot less predatory and parastitic than the ones the round eyes tend to prosecute.

What makes you think the locals will be used to build railroads? Maybe some initial land-clearing, but I suspect a large amount of the actual construction will be Chinese labour.

If America and China really are now about the same size economies, and America spends, what, $500 billion per year on the MIC? I think China spending even $100 billion per year on infrastructure in Africa, no matter how wasteful, is resources better allocated then missles and drones blowing up weddings and funerals.

I'm glad you like it since it's your money; extracted from your country by Bill Clinton by the "most favored nation" trade status act he signed that gave all our jobs and money to China in order to increase the profits of the corporations.

China had a "society", a "community", a "culture"; 3,000 years ago, when Europeans were still running around in animal skins with their bollox hanging out, wode tattoos by the dozen, chucking spears at one another.

China will probably do what it did each time it was on the cusp of being a world power, and collapse into warring states. There is evidence the Chinese reached the West Coast of North America and traded with the natives before Columbus made it to the Caribbean. Then they decided to just splinter apart and spend all their time fighting each other, luckily for us.

If you believe in any kind of Darwinian model of the world - the best adapted/strongest ultimately prosper at the expense of the weak - then what you're proposing should be inevitable. Africans are incapable of competing with anyone in that sense, sooner or later some foreigner will do to them what Westerners did in the New World...wholesale takeover, settling in, obliteration of the natives.

Unlike American Indians though Africa has one thing going for it in the competitive sense, and that's sky-high reproduction rates. At current rates the population of black Africa doubles every thirty years or so, and there are already 1+ billion of them. Wrap your head around that kind of compound growth.

Naw, 20 million Chinese men need wives. Why not set them up with lifelong employment building a monorail project, get them maried to a local girl, and set them up with a mortgage and a house, and enough credit so they never get out of debt?